Sometimes one has to laugh to keep from going nuts. So here's the laugher: on Monday the Supreme Court of the United States voted 5-4 to release upwards of 46,000 inmates from California's prison system, due primarily to "overcrowding." The joke? Alcatraz, one of nation's most famous prisons, which also happens to be located in California, has become a tourist attraction since it was closed by Attorney General Robert Kennedy in 1963.
Seriously, the decision was prompted by the Prison Litigation Relief Act (PLRA), part of which applies to "'civil action[s] with respect to prison conditions,' which are defined to include 'any civil proceeding arising under Federal law with respect to the conditions of confinement or the effects of actions by government officials on the lives of persons confined in prison…'" The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decided California's prison conditions were "unconstitutional," and the highest Court in the land agreed.
California has two years to lower the number of prisoners by more than 33,000 and they have two weeks to submit a plan for doing so. Progressive Governor Jerry Brown's reflexive solution? Spend $302 million the state doesn't have to move 32,500 inmates to county jurisdiction by mid-2013. In other words, raise taxes — or else.
A better real-world solution? Identify every illegal alien in the prison system and hand them over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement ((ICE) for deportation. According to the Center for Immigration Studies, in 2004, the last year for which data was available, 12.4 percent of California inmates were illegal aliens. The state prisons currently hold 143,335 inmates. 12.4 percent of them equals 17,735 inmates. In other words, just enforcing immigration law, which ought be considered as valid as any other law — like the Prison Litigation Relief Act for example — and half the problem would be solved.
Yet as most Americans know by now, some laws are "more equal" than others. And a state like California, where illegals can "hide" in the open in sanctuary cities, receive in-state college tuition, and where socials services for illegals are not only readily available but advertised, it just isn't going to happen.
Neither are other real-world, low-cost solutions such as the kind of accommodations used to house and feed disaster victims, including the recent innovation that t
urns tents into concrete shelters in less than 24 hours. Those tents are being contemplated for use in Japan, where hundreds of thousands of people remain homeless following the extensive damage Japan endured from the 9.0-magnitude earthquake and subsequent tsunami that struck that country on March 11. Of course, one can almost hear the legions of liberals who would decry the same "inhumane" living conditions for California prisoners that Japanese citizens would be happy to have — and perhaps the people of Joplin, Missouri as well.
In rendering the decision, SOTUS subsequently revealed the chasm between liberal and conservative thinking in this country. Justice Anthony Kennedy spoke for the Court's majority, saying suicidal prisoners were being held in "telephone booth-sized cages without toilets" and others, sick with cancer or in severe pain, died before being seen by a doctor. As many as 200 prisoners may live in a gymnasium, and as many as 54 may share a single toilet, he added. In dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia called the ruling "staggering" and "absurd," noting that the Court's majority just ordered the release of "46,000 happy-go-lucky felons, adding "terrible things are sure to happen as a consequence of this outrageous order."
While conceding that no one with cancer should be denied a doctor, the fact that felons are living in constricted conditions with lousy bathroom accommodations must be balanced by the obvious tradeoff that releasing thousands of prisoners into the state's general population might engender. If I recall correctly, progressive antipathy with regard to the death penalty has always centered around the idea that it should be completely invalid in every case, due possibility that a single innocent individual could be put to death as a result. Since I am not a progressive, I cannot imagine how they would rationalize the death of a single innocent individual killed by one of Justice Scalia's happy-go-lucky felons released by this ruling. Again, maybe some innocent victims are more equal than others.
Is there any common ground? Perhaps. One would think it's time for some serious national soul-searching regarding America's drug laws. If most people can't stomach outright legalization, advocated by no less a conservative stalwart than the late William F. Buckley, certainly a level of de-criminalization makes sense. Again, like the tradeoff mentioned above, maintaining a similar prohibition to the one enacted — and then repealed — against liquor should serve as a historical guide. Nothing gave organized crime a greater boost than Prohibition. People incarcerated solely for drug possession seems utterly anachronistic at this point in time.
Oddly enough, legalization ought to be more a conservative position than a progressive one. As a group who decries the excesses of the Nanny State, it is hard to reconcile that position with the idea that the state should treat its citizens like children with respect to telling them what they can and can't ingest. More on this in another column.
Perhaps the most urgent national conversation with regard to this ruling is the one in which the electorate should decide what incarceration per se, is all about. This is one American who thinks that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, if one has managed to do something bad enough to land in prison, punishment, as opposed to rehabilitation, should be the primary focus of that incarceration. Yet in a society currently infatuated with therapy, where good and evil have been supplanted by well and unwell — and where many prisons are equipped with gymnasiums, air-conditioning, cable TV and endless theories of rehabilitation — the idea that crime requires retribution of a more spartan nature may be out of fashion.
A majority of the Supreme Court seems to think so. Is America itself truly that "happy-go-lucky?" Californians have long considered themselves to be on the "cutting edge of societal evolution." For their sake, here's hoping cutting edge remains a figurative expression.
d) The evidence supports the three-judge court's finding that "no other relief [would] remedy the violation," 3626(a)(3)(E)(ii). The State's claim that out-of-state transfers provide a less restrictive alternative to a population limit must fail because requiring transfers is a population limit under the PLRA. Even if they could be regarded as a less restrictive alternative, the three-judge court found no evidence of plans for transfers in numbers sufficient to relieve over-crowding. The court also found no realistic possibility that California could build itself out of this crisis, particularly given the State's ongoing fiscal problems. Further, it rejected additional hiring as a realistic alternative, since the prison system was chronically understaffed and would have insufficient space were adequate personnel retained. The court also did not err when it concluded that, absent a population reduction, the Receiver's and Special Master's continued efforts would not achieve a remedy.
